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“The unguarded expressions that flit across our faces aren’t always the ones we want other people to readily identify,” Ms. McCall said — for example, during a job interview. “We rely to some extent on the transience of those facial expressions.”

There's that point, and there's also the point (not raised in the article) that people don't always focus 100% on one task at a time, so the expressions that cross our faces may or may not be attributed to the app/conversation/activity we're primarily engaged in at the time. Data without causal context can be worse than useless — it can be misleading.﻿

Yes, this! I have had a number of conversations with various people over the last year or two about how the humanities are what's missing from data science and even from hardware hacking. This does a nice job of taking that thought a step further.

"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.

"Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth. Whenever I teach older students, whether they’re undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn’t acquire earlier in life. They don’t call that skill the humanities. They don’t call it literature. They call it writing — the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.

"Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.

"No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance."﻿

Certainly there is "clear thinking" to be found in many disciplines. The area of clear thinking that I think is most obviously lacking in data science is the ability to form and ask good questions — because the answers you get from data can only be as good as the questions you ask. And whatever you think about the overall state of the humanities (that's another debate for another day, perhaps), I think they still do the best job, especially over time if one proceeds to the graduate level, of teaching the formation and investigation of worthwhile questions. YMMV per institution, of course.﻿

My Brit friends tell me that messing with the Tube map is tantamount to messing with the Queen, but I say there's always room for improvement (like not putting one station "north" of another when in reality it's south). I continue to be impressed with Eddie Jabbour and his colleagues at Kick Design.﻿

Just shipped QC of the new book by +Alasdair Allan and +Kipp Bradford to production! The ebook will be available on Tuesday, 2/26, with print shipping around 3/8.

If you liked what we did at the +Data Sensing Lab at +O'Reilly Strata and want to build and deploy your own environmental sensors, this book will teach you how. This is hardware hacking for data scientists!

"[D]ata science lives in the intersection of understanding not just the results of the algorithms, but also the subtle caveats of their applicability and the problem that should be solved. I sometimes feel like a new breed of matchmaker."﻿

A really important post from Mathbabe on the business culture around data science.

"From now on, if someone asks me if they should accept an offer as a data scientist, I’ll suggest they find out if the place is engaged in an “IT/data versus business” war, and if they are, to run away quickly. It’s a mindset that spells trouble."